Tuesday, June 04, 2002

"The supreme time waster, though, is television. Many people still have trouble understanding how egregious a time consumer, how obsolete a business model, how atavistic a technology, and how debauched a cultural force it is. You sit down on a couch in front of a screen, to watch degrading and titillating lowest-common-denominator trivia, scheduled for you in some netherworld betweeb Madison Avenue, the FCC, and Hollywood, offering a sordid stream of sleazy banalities, gun grunge, bedroom mayhem, and offal innuendoes, some preening as 'news' and some leering as entertainment, for as much as seven hours a day, on average, consuming perhaps two thirds of your disposable time, year after year, all in order to grab your eyeballs for a few minutes of artfully crafted advertising images that you don't want to see, of products that you will never buy. Is it a breast? Is it a thigh? No, it is a vant of you, 90 percent of the time, as the worst telemarketing spiel. Justifying this scheme is the "free public service" that television supposedly offers, namely the "serious" portions of the "news" (chiefly government propaganda) and Saturday morning children's programming (more propaganda)."

Monday, June 03, 2002

"Leaving Britain at night headed for Holland in a British Airways Boeing 757, I was captivated by their plan. I relished the esthetics of new integrated circuitry that could attach every computer to the web photonicly at gigabits per second, ultimately for a few score dollars apience, the price of an Ethernet NIC. I looked down from the plane at the motorways surrounding London, scintillating webs of golden light, streaming with a heavy traffic of automobiles, sparkling like so many IP packets riding directly on the hard clad silicon loops and I let myself imagine that Bookham had done it, brought the light down every British street, linked every Oxfordshire Lane in endless trunks and branches, hubs and roundabouts, brocaded across the British nocturnal landscape like gilded and luminous lace in the moonlight."